


thou with dark eyelids

by paraTactician



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-13
Updated: 2012-03-13
Packaged: 2017-11-01 22:16:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/361877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paraTactician/pseuds/paraTactician
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Concerning us there are no fables<br/>No brilliant poems, airily discarded<br/>Just liquid circles on Formica tables<br/>A silence perhaps too closely guarded</em>
</p><p>or: Sollux And Terezi Talk About Life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	thou with dark eyelids

**Author's Note:**

  * For [urbanAnchorite (t_ZM)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/t_ZM/gifts).



> Part of the [Veilstuck](http://paratactician.tumblr.com/post/15393480979/veilstuck) continuity.

_nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω._

* * *

You are still Terezi Pyrope. You are seven sweeps, going on eight sweeps, and you cannot fucking settle at all today. 

Dave and Rose are in one of the downstairs laboratories, being useful. Everyone is being useful! Everyone is working with a quiet efficiency and a sense of noble determination that on a better day would make your pusher swell with a sergeant’s pride. You are not being useful. You have spent the last half hour roaming the galleries of the meteor like some sort of horrid hate wraith, prodding moodily at the cracks between panels with the tip of your cane. You kicked an empty coffee pod the length of an entire corridor before it finally bounced off a stanchion and tumbled into the abyss, and this gave you a moment’s entirely fatuous satisfaction. Now you are lurking in a doorway, spying on coolkids. You sicken yourself. 

Dave smells sweaty and purposeful. He is dragging treasure chests out from under a tarpaulin and wrenching them open with a merry electronic chime. Rose is perched on a low crate with her back to you, and you can hear the clickety-click of her laptop keyboard. Taking inventory: deciding what of a sweep and a half’s accumulated garbage you might actually need to bring along with you. Sensible. Eminently practical. This only makes you grumpier. 

You trudge towards them, swishing and skittering your cane with unnecessary force. They turn as one, and their left hands move – Rose’s to her hip, Dave’s to the small of her back. Then they see you, and she drops hers. He leaves his in place. Something in your chest hurts, a bit. It’s not the gesture; it’s the ease of it, the familiarity. The _comfort._

“’Sup, TZ,” says your matesprit. 

You reach Rose’s crate. She’s turned back to her laptop, satisfied you’re not Jack Noir, and the back of her neck is at just the right height. You press your mouth to it, and then pinch up a tiny fold of cool, pale flesh between fangs and bottom lip, very carefully, not quite hard enough to draw blood. She hisses, and snakes one hand back to dig her purple nails into your thigh, through your jeans. You snuffle a little higher, and push your nose into the downy hair at her nape, breathe in lavender and essential oils, which you keep _telling_ her are a pointless drain on grist, except Kanaya always takes her side. 

Dave smacks your ass. 

“Hey, quit nibbling my typist,” he says. “Strider Incorporated takes a dim view of sexual harassment in the workplace.” 

You peer over Rose’s shoulder at the screen. She’s made a spreadsheet, black on white, with three columns: ‘Useful’, ‘Potentially Useful’, and ‘Leavings’. The third column is by far the longest. You take a deep breath and manage to parse out the last few entries: _Broken bows x 147. Pornographic horse paintings x 16. Shitty wands x life is entirely too short._

_Bicycle horns x 108._

A great, rushing sadness punches you in the top of your chest, and you bury your face in the curve of her neck again. 

“You okay, babe?” asks Dave, and puts a hand on your shoulder. You straighten up and turn to face him. He’s tall, these days, and kind of gangly, and just starting to broaden across the shoulders: he’ll never be solid, but a sweep of sparring with Karkat and Kanaya has laid down at least a suggestion of muscle on his chest and upper arms. (You and he do not spar, by joint compact.) His voice is settling into a deep, smooth bass you find endlessly reassuring. His movements are easier, too; when you first met him he was trying too hard for the coolkid slouch, and there was something a little hunched about it, a little self-conscious. Now he’s a natural. He trails from room to room, hands shoved in pockets, like at any second he might get so bored of walking he’ll just fall over, and there’s a lazy, echoing looseness about his steps and his gestures that sometimes makes your stomach lurch and your mouth prickle with indigo. 

He’s in tatty black jeans and a sweaty red T-shirt and you love him to distraction, him and his smartass sister both. There are nights you curl up across them, head on his chest, feet in her lap, and think that really you’re luckier than you have any right to be. But right now he won’t understand, and she’ll understand too well. You are trailing a shroud of misery, and you do not like yourself, and you cannot yet bear to have somebody fix you. Dave will try to make you laugh. Rose will try to make you cross. Both of them will kiss all the way up the inside of your arm until they reach your throat. Both of them will want a _reaction._

You are not up to reacting, just now. 

“I am fine!” you say, and it comes out blessedly clean. “Do you need any help?” 

Something menial, that’s what you want. Your skin is ants. You itch to be _doing_ , and yet you can’t focus enough to decide. You need to be put to work on something tiring and repetitive and utterly mindless, something hard enough to burn out your brain and its sticky cobwebs and turn your twitching tendons slack. 

Sex would be great, but if Karkat walks in and finds you in a coolkid sandwich during MISSION-CRITICAL GODDAMN PREPARATIONS you’ll lose at least fifty feet of moral altitude, and you do so love the view from up here. 

Dave scratches behind one ear. “Don’t think so. Rose?” 

“It’s all under control, Terezi,” she says, kindly. “Why don’t you go and lie down for a while? You sound exhausted.” 

You snap your jaws at her. “Lies and calumny! I am a _dynamo_ , Peppermint, I burn with the energy of a thousand Green Suns. I could wrestle a hoofbeast to death and dance on its corpse. Do not mistake my magnanimity for weakness.” 

“If you’d like a hoofbeast of your very own to grapple and cherish,” she says, “I have some particularly fine artistic representations – ” 

“ _Jesus_ , Rose, don’t even joke,” says Dave, in tones of rarefied suffering. “Of all the things I ain’t gonna miss about this fucking lump of rock, turgid muscledick popping out of dark corners 24/7 is number one with a bullet. Can’t go for a piss in the night without getting jumped by an eight-foot Chippendales minotaur with a boner that could stop a truck. Every trip to the shower’s like _Final Fantasy Horsecock_. Would you trade your funk for what’s behind the _third_ door? Clue: what’s behind the third door is a nude stallion with a nasty Goddamn gleam in his eye.” 

You feel her eyebrow arch. “Honestly? Three years of physical deprivation bordering at times on outright misery, and the aspect you’re most eager to put behind you, if you’ll pardon the expression, is the occasional sexually excited horse-man? Your priorities are as baffling as ever.” 

“My libido’s a delicate flower, Lalonde. It can’t flourish in an endless wasteland of throbbing dong. It needs light and fresh water and ladies with hardly any of their clothes on.” 

“Jade still thinks she doesn’t need a bra, despite prominent evidence to the contrary, and your girlfriend’s pyjamas consist of a broad smile and a fluffy hat shaped like a dragon. You have not a solitary ounce of my pity. Personally, I’m looking forward to a _bath_ , and some food that didn’t pop out of an alchemiter.” 

“Yeah, okay. Having the sun on my face is gonna be pretty fucking awesome, no lie.” 

“And rain? God, I miss rain.” 

“Wind.” 

“Any air that doesn’t taste faintly of aluminum.” 

“Birds.” 

“Grass.” 

“Carpeting. I never fucking appreciated what a kick-ass invention carpeting was ‘til I spent three years going _clang clang clang_ everywhere I walk. First time I feel deep-pile under these feet I’m just gonna lie down and make snow angels.” 

The first inklings of the problem begin to dawn on you. 

* * *

The heart of the station is the Mainframe. Preserving an artificial environment on a crumbly bit of rock falling through infinity is not easy, and requires a couple of hundred subroutines and autonomous processes ticking along every hour of the night and indifferent day. The loss of a single one of these would kill you all more slowly, but no less surely, than Jack himself would. You remember the day Sollux found the Mainframe; you were with him. You’d both stood in the doorway and taken deep breaths. 

“Okay,” he’d said. “Metal.” 

“Duh.” 

“And plastic.” 

“Good! Plastic is subtle. Keep going.” 

“It’s like... it’s fizzy. Makes my nose tingle. Like dust, but... hotter.” 

“ _Very_ good,” you had said, pleased. “That is the smell of electricity.” 

“Oh, bullshit. Electricity doesn’t fucking smell. This is another hilarious round of Con the Blind Guy, like when you told me I should be able to smell that Rose was happy.” 

“A _real_ matesprit, Appleberry – ” 

“ _You can’t smell happiness._ ”

“Okay, okay,” you’d said, laughing, “you are right. If you want to smell that someone is happy you have to smell around it, you can’t go straight there, and that is advanced level! We will cover it in due time. But electricity has a very distinctive smell, and it is one of my personal favourites. You are smelling it now. Breathe it through, the way I taught you.” 

He’d stood there for a few seconds, breathing. Then he’d said, “There’s a lot of computers in here, right?” 

You’d twisted your mouth up. You could pick out all the detail he could not: the dull grey screens, the thick black sprays of wire, the cables hanging slack in bunches. “Yes,” you had admitted. “There are an _awful_ lot of computers in here. In fact I think this room may be _made_ of computers. It is a little bit terrifying.” 

He had straightened up, then; set his shoulders, cricked his neck, locked his hands, and crunched. 

“Sit me down,” he’d said firmly, “and read me the first screen.” 

As time had gone on he and the room had become one. There was no other way to describe it, and sometimes it worried you. He carved out a hollow in its centre: the comfiest chair Karkat and Kanaya could find on the whole station, four keyboards lovingly dotted with tiny nubs of dried paint by a patient Rose, a mouse, two trackballs, thirty-six screens, a coffee-mug bearing the solemn legend PRINCESS!, a squashy stress ball made to look like a miniature pumpkin which he always managed to lose, a little origami rose in pink paper she’d folded and spritzed with her perfume, and the all-important pair of headphones. From there he ran the world. 

One day you had come in to find him in his chair as normal, frowning and listening, except that a single loop of glossy black cable, thick as your thumb, had dropped free from a restraint somewhere; it hung down like a vine, and somehow, by some weird convolution, it had twisted itself around his upper arm. Not tight; just a limp single bind, under and round and back up into the shadows overhead. 

The thing that had almost stopped your stupid heart, for no reason you could place, was that he hadn’t noticed. 

* * *

Today, though, the Mainframe is silent and still. The chair is empty. The headphones are hooked over one arm. The squashy pumpkin lies orange and forlorn beside a keyboard. The coffee-mug is nowhere to be smelt. A little surprised, you mount the rickety metal steps and begin the climb to the roof. 

As you ascend, you remember. 

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]! -- 

GC: H3LLO!  
TA: holy 2hiit.  
TA: thii2 ii2 kiind of unexpected.  
TA: hey.   
GC: WHO 4R3 YOU?   
TA: okay ii realii2e you’re new to thii2 but my name’2 riight there iin the box, 2ee.  
TA: ii appreciiate thii2 must be diiffiicult, take your tiime.   
GC: OH Y3S 1 S33  
GC: YOUR3 QU1T3 R1GHT  
GC: ‘M4SS11V3 SM4RT4SS 11S ONL11N3’  
GC: HOW STUP1D OF M3  
TA: what the fuck, diid you ju2t copy my quiirk?  
TA: you diidn’t even do iit riight, you wanted M42211V3 2M4RT4SS.  
TA: oh fuck no that’2 a gogawful piileup.  
TA: let’2 not do that agaiin okay. 

It was the first time anyone had ever made you laugh. 

GC: >:)  
GC: 1 DONT KNOW, 1T W4S K1ND OF FUNNY  
GC: WHY 4R3 YOU OBS3SS3D W1TH TH3 NUMB3R TWO?   
TA: becau2e iit’2 the be2t number obviiou2ly.  
TA: way better than 1.  
TA: or 4.  
TA: we won’t even talk about 3, iit’2 that fuckiing terriible.   
GC: FUCK OFF! >:P  
GC: 1F YOUR3 GO1NG TO H4V3 YOUR W31RD G1MM1CK YOU SHOULD 4T L34ST DO 1T PROP3RLY  
TA: what are you talkiing about, ii’m doiing thii2 2hiit 2o properly.  
TA: thii2 2hiit ha2 been to 2ome 2ort of exclu2iive 2nobby fiinii2hiing 2chool.  
TA: iit2 bow tiie ii2 iimmaculate and iit never miixe2 up the marrow 2craper wiith the gougiing 2poon.   
GC: H4H4H4 2POON  
GC: SORRY  
GC: 4NYW4Y LOOK, YOU D1D 1T 4G41N, JUST TH3R3  
GC: ‘B33N TO’  
TA: oh 2hiit.  
TA: ii diidn’t even fuckiing thiink of that.  
TA: fuckiing hell, ii’m 2uch a 2tupiid nook2taiin.  
TA: can’t even get my own fuckiing quiirk riight, niice job 2ollux you fuck.   
GC: SOLLUX?  
GC: 1S TH4T YOUR N4M3? >:D  
TA: oh fuck!  
TA: fuck fuck fuck.  
TA: gogdammiit why am ii 2uch a bulgeliicker?  
TA: maybe iif ii triied really hard ii could fuck thii2 up even more, 2eem2 fuckiing unliikely though.  
TA: ii ought to ju2t punch my2elf iin the 2hame globe2 over and over but ii’d probably fuckiing mii22.  
TA: oh FUCK ii diid iit agaiin.   
GC: H3Y!  
GC: NOT TH4T 1 DONT 3NJOY H4V1NG MY VOC4BUL4RY BRO4D3N3D L1K3 TH1S  
GC: BUT 1 TH1NK YOU 4R3 B31NG 4 B1T H4RD ON YOURS3LF!  
GC: SOLLUX 1S 4 COOL N4M3  
GC: 1 4M T3R3Z1, T3R3Z1 PYROP3  
GC: 1T 1S N1C3 TO M33T YOU!   
TA: oh.  
TA: well ii mean.  
TA: 2ollux captor.  
TA: iit’2 niice two meet you two.   
GC: S33?  
GC: MUCH B3TT3R >:) 

* * *

He always sits on the edge. You remember listening, breathless, the first time he made the walk: scraping tiny arcs ahead of himself with the tip of one sneaker, straight-backed, arms held a little away from his sides, fingers nervous and splayed. _At least take my cane!_ , you’d said, and he’d snorted. You hadn’t told him that John was lingering by the stairs, ready with an updraft if he so much as tottered. But he’d made it, and had lowered himself carefully into position, hands braced on the metal and the parapet pressing into the backs of his knees, his feet dangling. He’d nodded in satisfaction and you’d handed him his coffee, although he’d taken so long to cross the last three feet you were sure it must be cold. 

These days, you know, he can do it on auto-pilot; which does not surprise you. _You’ve_ lost track of how many times you’ve emerged from this doorway, sniffed the still air, crossed the gap, eased yourself down beside him, a companionable elbow’s-length apart. Sometimes you bring your own coffee. Sometimes you bring a book. Often he does not want to talk; he’s too deep in his own head, and you know from the precise tenor of his grunt that, while he’s pleased you’re there, conversation is unwelcome. You had thought this would drive Rose to distraction – Rose, who needs words like the rest of you need water – until the day you saw her come up here and kneel behind him, put her hands on his shoulders, rest her cheek on the back of his neck, and close her eyes. A great warm delight had spread through your stomach, and several of your most nagging doubts had evaporated on the spot. 

You know every inch of him. Every line and slope; every tic and wince. He is a hive you’ve lived in all your life, and you know which floorboards creak. You’ve no idea if you can hide things from him any more: it’s been over a sweep since you’ve tried. You cannot imagine a world in which he is not. The time he got really ill you didn’t sleep, just lay in Dave’s arms and shook with fear while Dave murmured _c’mon, babe, Captor’s an ornery son of a bitch, dude’s way too grumpy to die_ and Karkat kicked things in the room next door. The time _you_ got really ill Sollux stayed in the sickbay for fifty-seven hours, pacing, until the oxygen recycler crashed and you all started getting high on fumes. You will never forget Jade’s peals of helpless laughter, interspersed with horrified apologies, as she sat by your bed and sponged your brow. 

Every time you forget to have lunch he tells you off and makes you eat half of his. He leaves a special echo in the air, an eddying pattern all his own. He gave you Pyralspite. You know him better than you ever knew another living creature across two universes, and every day you come and sit beside him on the edge of a roof and you do not touch him. 

You wonder if it’s possible to get trapped in a day, or a sweep, or a moment: to live it again and again and again until at last you get it right. 

“A great day for science!” you say, flopping into place. “The Lesser Husktop-Pecking Captor, sighted outside his natural habitat. Prominent mediaggravators have been notified and we hope to have a live feed from the scene set up shortly.” 

“TZ, I come up here like five times a day.” 

“Objection! Defendant’s testimony is sloppy and imprecise. You come up here _exactly_ five times a day: at nine, eleven, fourteen, half past sixteen, and twenty-one o’clock.” 

“Logic tells me there’s a point to this somewhere, but I’m fucked if I know where you’ve hidden it.” 

“The _point_ , Mr Captor,” you say gently, “is that it is currently twenty-two minutes past twelve o’clock. Coffee Time is not for another ninety-eight minutes. This deviation is, to my knowledge, unprecedented.” 

You are teasing, but you are not joking. In the last sweep and a half of exile you have learned many things about your friends that you would never have known from Trollian. You know that Kanaya puts sugar in her tea and prefers sitting on the floor to sitting on chairs. You know that Karkat snores like a capricorn breaching, a bone-rattling, chthonic rumble that swells from hesitant beginnings to a triumphant finale that makes the bulkheads of the station quiver. And you know that Sollux Captor is a _machine_. You had not begun to suspect the true depths of his obsessive-compulsive commitment to schedule until you watched him for a few days and realised that his morning shower always lasted for _exactly_ ninety seconds. Chronorings set themselves by Sollux. Electrons use him to time their jumps between energy levels. John once suggested that you should all give up on hours entirely as a relic, and switch to a new structure based on intervals between Sollux’ coffee breaks, like bells on a ship. Sollux drinking coffee at a time he does not normally drink coffee is, you are fairly sure, one of the five portents of the Apocalypse. 

Which could of course be the point. 

“Maybe I just wanted a coffee,” he says. 

“Of course,” you say brightly. “You are notoriously governed by your whims and fancies. A free spirit, a thing of air and chaos, careening at random on your joyous course. What will Sollux do today? Perhaps he will paint himself pink! Perhaps he will sing a little song. One simply never knows.” 

He turns to stare at you and raises an eyebrow in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of one R. Lalonde. “You’ve got KK writing your material now? You should’ve come to me, I’d have lent you ten bucks, no problem.” 

By Sollux’ usual standards this is not even a burn. It is a splash of warm water, or a two-second burst from a hairdryer. But the little knot of misery in your gut only tightens, and you look at your knees. 

When you miss the beat he shifts beside you. “TZ? Ah, shit. Hey, look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean – ” 

You squeeze your eyes shut and shake your head, and maybe Karkat is writing your material after all, based on the obscenities that leap to mind. Nice going, Pyrope, why don’t you see if you can make _all_ your friends feel like shit by the end of the day? That would be a record, even for you! 

“I’m sorry,” you say, small and taut with self-loathing. “I am being a jerk. I should leave you to have your coffee in peace.” 

“TZ, sit the fuck down,” he says wearily, and grabs your arm and tugs you back before you’ve got even halfway to your feet. You’re too surprised to fight. Spontaneous physical contact is even less Sollux than unscheduled caffeine. You wonder dizzily if you’ve punched through the space-time barrier to the Shitty Melodrama Dimension, and are now starring in the Inevitable Body-Swap Episode. Maybe you’re not Terezi at all. Maybe, right now, in the mess, Jade Harley is cackling with glee and trying to lick a flustered Kanaya. Maybe you _are_ Karkat. 

“Tell me what’s wrong,” he says, “or I will pour this coffee all over your head. It’ll be a fucking shameful waste of coffee, but I’ll do it.” 

You feel a stab of gratitude. Threats! Threats are nice and keep everything simple. You know where you are, with a threat. 

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” you say, which is close enough to the truth that you can probably swing it. He may have soaked up an alarming number of her tricks, but he’s not actually Rose. (Unless bodyswap, in which case all bets are off.) 

“Yeah, you do. You’re pissy for the same reason I’m up here drinking coffee at the wrong time. Come on, TZ, it’s not _hard_.”

You slump a little. “It’s our last day in the Veil.” 

“Yep. Now, I’ll bet you the dishes you just came from seeing Strider, and he’s scampering about like a fucking squeakbeast on Bright Season’s Eve.” He pauses expectantly, and clicks his tongue. “Look, for the next few minutes, you just say _Yes, Sollux, you’re right_ after everything I tell you, okay?” 

“Eat a bulge, Tholluckth, you smell,” you chirp obediently. 

He nods. “So: why is the prospect of leaving the Veil at long fucking last making you tetchy, him happy, and me coffee?” 

You rub at the back of one hand with the heel of the other. “Because everything is going to change.” 

“D minus. See me afterwards.” 

“Fuck you!” 

“I’ve seen better analysis on Flatbottomedbeveragecontainr. _Everything’s going to change_ my bony ass, what the fuck does that even mean? Be specific.” 

You glower at him. “Because, _specifically_ , we are going to a new session.” 

“Whose session?” 

“Dave’s Bro’s. And everyone else’s weird human lusii.” 

“So we’re likely to end up on...?” 

“Yes, alright! You can drop the Thocratic Method, Appleberry. We are going to be on Earth, and I have never been to Earth, and I am freaking out about it. Are you happy?” 

He jerks a shoulder. “Dunno. Are you?” 

“Obviously not.” 

“Then I guess I’m not either. Look, TZ, it’s completely fucking understandable. This time tomorrow there’s a good chance we’ll be holed up somewhere on alt-Earth, and even if it’s alt it’s still _Earth_ , and so they feel like they’re going home, and we feel like we’re heading into the fucking jungle. It’s all territorial instinct. It’s _natural_.”

You shake your head grimly. “C plus. Must do better. I’ve been scared! I know what scared feels like. I’m not scared, I’m _sad_.”

He swigs his coffee and you hear the little gulp as it goes down. Then he says, as if he hadn’t liked the taste, “Yeah. Me too.” 

“There is no reason to be sad! It is completely irrational! I hate this stupid meteor! I hate eating out of cans and having to fill the shower tank by hand and no trees and rationing my chalk to save grist! It sucks! And Earth sounds really cool anyway! Why am I so _sad_ , Sollux?!” 

He says nothing. This means he is thinking. When Sollux can’t or won’t answer a question he fires off something dismissive. When he goes quiet, he’s powering up the Captor 3000. You can almost hear the fans hum. You fill the gap by stealing his coffee and taking a sip. It’s mostly cold, and appallingly strong, and it only jangles you worse. 

He sucks in half a breath, and you think he’s about to speak, but nothing happens. Then he says, in an odd kind of casual voice, “Hey. Guess what I found the other day?” 

“A whole box of red chalk?” 

“Come on, like that’d escape your freakish snout for a solitary second. Nah. It was in one of the cabling ducts, must have fallen through a grate.” He reaches down and teases something from his jeans pocket. It’s a bundle of pale purple fabric which smells faintly of lavender. You’re lining up a cheap shot when he unfolds it gingerly, like a flower, to reveal something slim and black and very sharp. 

You pick it up, carefully, between thumb and forefinger, and bring it near your mouth. 

You are holding a triangular sliver of black plastic, as long as your finger, and curved along its surface. It must have come from a sphere about the size of an apple. You feel the clutch of a creeping and inexplicable horror. 

“They’re all around us, here,” he says quietly. “Musclebeast posters. Bloodstains. Bits of 8-ball. Can’t get away from ‘em. Shit, air filtration in a closed system, we’re probably still breathing them in.” 

Sollux has always had a knack for finding the most disturbing possible angle on a situation. You take a shallow, cautious breath, suddenly terrified you might taste colours that shouldn’t be there. 

“We’re not sad because we’re going somewhere new,” you say, and the words on your tongue have the sour tang of accuracy. “We’re sad because we’re leaving them behind.” 

“Yeah. This is the last place they saw. This is the last place they _were_. Alternia’s last stand. So long as we’re on this shitty old station, we’re somewhere all our friends used to be. The second we step off it, we burn the final bridge.” 

Your chest feels hot and empty. You’re still holding the black shard. 

“What do we do?” you say, a little helpless. 

“Say goodbye to them,” he says, “I guess. Can’t take ‘em with us, and we sure as Hell can’t stay here.” 

“Well. You go first, then.” 

He goes quiet again, and shifts weight, and for a moment you think he’s actually going to come out with some dry little eulogy; a hacker’s farewell. Instead he just says, firmly and to no-one, “Equius Zahhak.” 

“Tavros Nitram,” you respond, after a second’s hesitation, and you could swear you almost smell chocolate. 

“Nepeta Leijon.” 

You bite your lip, hard, and fold the little sliver of plastic in your fist; clutch it like the hilt of a sword. “Vriska Serket.” 

“Feferi Peixes,” he says, and you hear his voice catch, and neither of you care. 

But it’s a competition now, like everything the two of you do, like all the days you stayed up playing _Battlefield Alternia_ , like the dreadful rainbow drinker novella you co-wrote for Kanaya, like the great Make Karkat Mad Olympics when you were five, which you still won’t admit he won. So you reach deep, deep down and drag out, through throat muscles that don’t want to let it go: “Gamzee motherfucking Makara.” 

He exhales, like a line’s been crossed, or a rope cut. “Well, if it comes to _that_ ,” he says, “Eridan fucking Ampora, unbelievable asshole that he was.” And he picks up the half-full coffee mug from where you left it, sticks it out above the void at arm’s length, and solemnly upends it. 

You smell the bitter streak the liquid cuts through the air as the station snatches it down and away, and you hear it spatter off metal somewhere far below. And that is all. Seven friends lost, and cold coffee spilt on colder steel. So feeble a libation, for such mighty dead. 

You choke with laughter, and then start to cry. 

You cry very quietly, this time. You do not sniffle, or sob, or even whimper. Hot salt tears just start running down your face in two thin but steady streams, dripping off the point of your chin and onto your shirt like they may be a permanent fixture now, at least until you dry out entirely. A long time ago you would have run away. These days you don’t know where you’d go. You curl your hands on the roof’s edge and drive your claws into the metal, because if you push hard enough they’ll snap, all of you will snap, a chain reaction from your fingertips up your arms and into your skull, shattering like porcelain –

“TZ,” says Sollux, and there’s something wrong in his voice, something creaking and uncertain and strange. His arm crawls round your back as if it’s scared. You feel the tower hinge beneath you. “TZ,” he says helplessly, “fuck, TZ, _shoosh_ ,” and you fall into him, because there’s such a thing as gravity, even miles out in space. 

He smells of electricity, and your nose tingles. You rake your claws in desperation across the slubby cotton of his T-shirt front and it must hurt, it must, his hand stops moving and you panic but then it’s on your neck and it’s _stroking_ you, it’s digging up into your hair, your horrible tangled hair, and finding one horn and cupping it, brushing the tip. 

You clutch at him. If you let go of him now there will be nothing else again. 

This close, his tension – the juddering coil-spring at his core, the creak of metal under stress – is like physical pain, a burn against your skin, and you cannot abide it. For Sollux Captor to thrum like taut cord is suddenly as offensive to you as every breach and impropriety your law books dare to list. Nervously, you flatten your palm against his chest. Then you pat him. No-one dies. You pat him twice, and a third time, and he bites off a breath and something flops end-over-end inside you. You risk a circle. You can feel each rib through the shirt, and you comb your fingers along them like you want to smooth them out. He shifts a little and you seize the chance to burrow closer. 

This is outside your experience! You and Sollux Captor, three times joint winners of the Trolls Most Likely To Know What They’re Doing Award, do not know what the _fuck_ you’re doing. 

He drags one thumb down the curve of your spine and you shiver. 

It is the opposite of being turned on. He is turning you _off_. It feels as though you had a plug buried in the back of your neck, and he’s pulled it out, and now cool silvery liquid is trickling down from your head into the rest of your body. Your pulse slows. Your breaths turn thick and languid. The hot scratchy fuck-or-fight feeling that’s been chewing at your nerves all day puddles into droplets. You make a throaty noise you don’t recognise. Is your blood actually _cooling down_ , or is that your imagination? 

“Sollux,” you say, and it comes out slurred and happy. 

You reach up to his throat and trace it with your fingertips. He says something husky you don’t think was a word, and you take a ridiculous delight in the vibration. His face is buried in your hair. You are blissful; utterly, simplistically blissful, on the bone-deep level of a good meal or good sex, but different again. It is slow, and fluid, and inarticulate, and so are you. The fact that he is so smart and you are so smart and yet somehow neither of you thought to do this three sweeps ago strikes you as the funniest thing in the world, but you’re too slack to laugh, so you make a kind of low, gleeful coughing noise against his collarbone. 

Tomorrow you will meet Dave’s lusus, maybe. You are excited to meet Dave’s lusus. You suspect he will help you find all sorts of new ways to give Dave shit, if half the stories are true. Tomorrow you see Earth, home of oak trees, and giraffebeasts, and _Judge Judy_ , and the intriguing nacho, and all the other things you have been promised. 

Tomorrow you breathe clean air. Tomorrow you leave Alternia, for the first and final time. But the best part of it is coming with you. So that’s okay. 

You doze on the warmth of his chest, and stars you’ve never heard go spinning by.


End file.
